War And Peace

All these men and horses seemed to be pressing on, impelled by some invisible force. During the hour Pierre spent watching them they kept on streaming out of the various streets all with a single idea in mind: to get through as fast as they could. They were all the same, crashing into each other, getting angry, spoiling for a fight. White teeth snarled, faces scowled, the same curses flew back and forth, and all these men had the same look of gallant determination and cold callousness that Pierre had seen on the corporal’s face that morning while the drums had been beating.

In the late afternoon the officer commanding their escort rallied his men, and with much yelling and forceful persuasion got in among the baggage-trains and fetched the prisoners, surrounded on all sides, out on to the Kaluga road.

They set off at a quick pace, took no breaks and only halted when the sun was going down. The baggage-carts were shunted up close together, and the men began to bed down for the night. Every man jack of them seemed irritable and unhappy. The cursing, angry bellowing and fighting went on and on. A carriage had driven into one of their carts from behind and run a shaft through it. Soldiers rushed up from all sides, some lashed the carriage horses across their heads as they turned them round, others scrapped among themselves, and Pierre saw one German badly wounded by a blow to the head from a short sword.

Now they had come to a standstill out in the country on a dismal and chilly autumn evening, all these men seemed to have been struck by the same sensation, a nasty awakening from the sense of urgency that had carried them along as they left the city. Now they were at a halt it seemed to have dawned on them they had no idea where they were going, and that there was a lot of pain and hardship ahead of them along the way.

During this halt the prisoners came in for rougher handling by the soldiers in charge than they had had when they set off. For the first time they were given horse-meat to eat.

Every single member of the escorting force, from the officers down to the commonest soldier, now harboured a kind of personal animosity towards every one of the prisoners, all of which was in stark contrast to their earlier friendly relations.

This animosity was redoubled when the roll was called and it was discovered that in the hurly-burly of getting out of Moscow one Russian soldier had managed to escape by pretending he was ill with stomach pains. Pierre had watched a Frenchman lash out at a Russian soldier for wandering too far from the road and heard the captain who had been friendly with him reprimanding an NCO for letting the prisoner escape, and threatening him with court martial. When the NCO argued that the prisoner was too ill to walk the officer told him their orders were to shoot anyone who couldn’t keep up. Pierre felt that the fateful force that had laid him low during the execution, and had been nowhere apparent during his imprisonment, had now taken over his existence again. It made him feel scared, but he also felt that even as this fateful force did its best to crush him, a new, independent, vital strength was building up in his soul all the time.

Pierre’s evening meal, as he chatted to his companions, consisted of rye flour and horse-meat soup.

Neither Pierre nor any of his companions made any mention of what they had seen in Moscow, or the harsh treatment they were now getting from the French, or the orders to shoot stragglers they had just heard about. All of them seemed determined to defy their worsening circumstances by remaining particularly cheerful and lively. They reminisced and talked about funny things they had seen on the march, steering well clear of anything to do with their present situation.

It was long after sunset. A few stars were lit up across the sky, the rising full moon had painted a red glow along the horizon as if it was on fire, and the huge red ball hung there in the grey darkness, shimmering strangely. There was more and more light. It was the end of the evening, but night had not yet begun. Pierre got up and walked away from his new companions, wandering off between the camp-fires to the other side of the road, where he had been told the common prisoners were camping. He wanted to talk to them. On the road a French sentry stopped him and told him to go back.

Pierre did go back, but not to his companions by the camp-fire; he went over to an unharnessed wagon where there was nobody about. Tucking his legs up under him, and lowering his head, he sat down on the cold ground, leant back against a wagon wheel, and spent a long time sitting there quite still, just thinking. More than an hour went by. No one disturbed him. Suddenly he burst out laughing, and his heavy, good-humoured laughter was so loud that men looked round in astonishment on every side to hear such a burst of weird hilarity evidently coming from a man sitting there on his own.